• The openings of the Mob Museum in February and the Neon Museum this summer will illuminate and celebrate two facets — one dark, one light — of Las Vegas history. That the Mob Museum itself will open in the renovated federal courthouse where the historic Kefauver Committee poked into organized crime is a bonus.
• After getting major upgrades, the Nevada State Museum and the Atomic Testing Museum will hit their stride in 2012. The Nevada State Museum, recently moved into its new home in the Springs Preserve, is walking and talking like a truly dynamic and forward-thinking museum, delivering open-mouthed “wow” moments to kids and adults alike (yes, I’m guilty of that). Also, the National Atomic Testing Museum recently added “national” to its moniker, thanks to an act of Congress — a name change that’s much more than cosmetic. It’s a profile boost that will attract attention, support and money, and may be the seed for the museum’s future greatness as the nation’s definitive site for telling the story of American nuclear weapons testing. See page 11 for more on this.
• Other museum developments are worth note. The Lied Children’s Discovery Museum opens in November as the Discovery Children’s Museum in Symphony Park, part of a new hunk of cultural circuitry downtown. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Discovery renderings, but they’ll have a climbable interactive learning mountain inside the place. (I can only hope it’s also made of candy.) Also, the Hispanic Museum recently opened at its new home in the Boulevard Mall, highlighting the culture and contributions of Hispanics in Southern Nevada. And, finally, the Las Vegas Art Museum will reopen its doors, so to speak, as it moves to the UNLV campus (see page 11), where a partnership between LVAM and UNLV’s College of Fine Arts ensures the collection will serve both students and the broader community.
Bonus: Many of these developments are happening in or near the city core, continuing the happy simmer of urban renaissance we’ve got going on.
• But 2012 may mark another endeavor that will give Southern Nevada a serious boost: The creation of the Ice Age National Monument in the Upper Las Vegas Wash. It’s a 23,000-acre site that’s like an epoch-spanning cemetery filled with fossils of mammoths, massive bison, lions and — most awesome of all — giant sloths. And to think that local governments and developers were once drooling over this site, hoping to carve it up into subdivisions (Mammoth Heights? Sloth Estates?). Proponents of the plan hope Sen. Harry Reid introduces a bill as early as this month to create the national monument. (The only potential dog in the manger: NV Energy, which remains stubbornly obsessed with building a renewable energy transmission line through the area.)
The triumph of mammoth tusks over stucco tracts is a tidy metaphor for what should be our new economic model. We tried a ride on the growth machine. The engine blew up, and we’re still wiping soot from our faces. Whatever the new Southern Nevada looks like, let’s hope “cultural tourism” takes its rightful place in the story we tell the world — and the community we build at home.